THE CATHEDRAL
“the artist’s eye view of the dome, courtesy of a 20 metre high scaffold platform equipped with a lift”
The massive Romanesque Cathedral which for the first time will offer an access to Heaven, and what a joyous and playful Heaven; sonorous and golden. Populated by a host of Saints and divinities, adolescent angels and musicians surrounding the Virgin who, on a cloud is transported and lifted towards her Son who comes to welcome her. While in the pendentives, enormous shells surround the saints, the protectors of the city. The liturgical theme was theologically important and civically central (the whole city in fact, was under the protection of the Virgin), but Correggio, completed it between 1526 and 1530 in an astonishing and outrageous manner. Astonishing for the foreshortened effects that highlight the height of the dome, outrageous for the unceasing movement of legs, muscles and arms of youngsters trying to float in the huge vacuum of the nave. Like the apostles who, on the octagonal brim of the tambour, discover the empty sepulchre of the Virgin and, stupefied, watch her Assumption. So, in an extreme virtuous joke, the church is transformed into the sepulchre. The whirling and concentric movement of bodies and clouds in this Heaven, crowded more by bodies than souls, young and charming bodies, in some case naked (Eve, the musician angels, etc), attract and consume the spectator. But at the same time it is far from the medieval idea of a hierarchical and theologically immobile Heaven, indifferent to the passions of the body and the heart, which was at the time scandalous particularly to the vestrymen and Church officials.
